Richard Matheson was an American author and screenwriter, primarily in the Fantasy, Horror, and Science Fiction genres. He is perhaps best known as the author of I Am Legend, which has been adapted three times as a major motion picture.

Contents

Biographical information

Personal

Matheson was born to Norwegian immigrant parents, Matheson was raised in Brooklyn and graduated from Brooklyn Technical High School in 1943. He then entered the military and spent World War II as an infantry soldier. In 1949 he earned his bachelor's degree in journalism from the University of Missouri and moved to California in 1951. He married in 1952 and has four children, three of whom Chris, Richard Christian, and Ali Matheson) are writers of fiction and screenplays.

Career

Matheson's first novel, Someone Is Bleeding, was published in 1953.

Influence

Other writers

Stephen King has listed Richard Matheson as a creative influence and his novel Cell is dedicated to Matheson, along with filmmaker George A. Romero.

In the August 7, 2009, issue of Entertainment Weekly devoted to vampires, Anne Rice stated that when she was a child Matheson's short story "A Dress Of White Silk" was a prime early influence on her interest in vampires and fantasy fiction.

Tributes

In books

In Richard Christian Matheson's novel Created By, the hero's father is named Burt, a reference to Matheson senior's middle name.

Richard Christian Matheson re-wrote his father's short story "Dance of the Dead" for the TV series Masters of Horror. It was directed by Tobe Hooper and starred Robert Englund and Ryan McDonald.

In films

Richard's son, Richard Christian Matheson, penned the screenplay for "Battleground" for the first segment of Stephen King's Nightmares & Dreamscapes. He paid homage to his father by including the Zuni fetish doll from the last segment of Trilogy of Terror in a scene.

M. Night Shyamalan's The Happening, about inexplicable mass suicide, has a parallel with Matheson's short story Lemmings, which is also about inexplicable mass suicide.

In television

A character named "Senator Richard Matheson" appeared in several episodes of The X-Files. The series' creator, Chris Carter, was a fan of Matheson's work on two series that influenced The X-Files (The Twilight Zone and Kolchak: The Night Stalker). Also, the TV series adaptation of Honey, I Shrunk the Kids had the Szalinski family relocating to the town of Matheson, Colorado.

In the J. Michael Straczynski's Babylon 5 TV series, the episode "A Spider in the Web" mentions a ship called the Matheson as one of many requesting permission to leave the station. The telepath "John Matheson" in Crusade was named in honour of Matheson.